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Anna Lane was born on October 12, 1908 in Old Saybrook, Connecticut as the youngest of three daughters to Peter Clark Lane and Bertha James Lane. Her parents belonged to the black minority of the small town. Her father was a pharmacist and her mother was a shop owner, chiropodist, and hairdresser. Ann and her sister were raised "in the classic New England tradition: a study in efficiency, thrift, and utility (…) They were filled with ambitions that they might not have entertained had they lived in a city along with thousands of poor blacks stuck in demeaning jobs."[2]

The family had none of the trappings of the middle class until Petry was well into adulthood. Before her mother became a businesswoman, she worked in a factory, and her sisters, Ann's aunts, worked as maids. The Lane girls were raised sheltered from most of the disadvantages other black people in the United States had to experience due to the color of their skin; however there were a number of incidents of racial discrimination.

As she wrote in "My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience," published in Negro Digest in 1946, there was an incident where a racist decided that they did not want her on a beach. Her father wrote a letter to The Crisis in 1920 or 1921 complaining about a teacher who refused to teach his daughters and his niece.[3] Another teacher humiliated her by making her read the part of Jupiter, the illiterate ex-slave in the Edgar Allan Poe short story "The Gold-Bug".

Petry had a strong family foundation with well-traveled uncles, who had many stories to tell her when coming home; her father, who overcame racial obstacles, opened a pharmacy in the small town; and her mother and aunts set a strong example: Petry, interviewed by the Washington Post in 1992, says about her tough female family members that “it never occurred to them that there were things they couldn’t do because they were women.”[4]

Petry's desire to become a professional writer was raised first in high school when her English teacher read her essay to the class and commented on it with the words: “I honestly believe that you could be a writer if you wanted to.”[5] The decision to become a pharmacist was her family’s. She went to college and graduated with a Ph.G. degree from Connecticut College of Pharmacy in New Haven in 1931 and worked in the family business for several years, while also writing short stories.

On February 22, 1938, she married George D. Petry of New Iberia, Louisiana, which brought her to New York. She not only wrote articles for newspapers such as The Amsterdam News, or The People's Voice, and published short stories in The Crisis, but also worked at an after-school program at P.S. 10 in Harlem. It was during this period that she experienced and understood what the majority of the black population of the United States had to go through in their everyday life. Traversing the Harlem streets, living for the first time among large numbers of poor black people, seeing neglected children up close—Petry's early years in New York inevitably made impressions on her and led her to put her experiences to paper. Her daughter Liz explained to the Washington Post that “her way of dealing with the problem was to write this book, which maybe was something that people who had grown up in Harlem couldn’t do.”[this quote needs a citation]

Petry's most popular novel The Street was published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship with book sales topping a million copies.[1]

Back in Old Saybrook in 1947, Petry worked on Country Place (1947), The Narrows (1953), other stories, and books for children, but they have never achieved the same success as her first book. She drew on her personal experiences of the hurricane in Old Saybrook in Country Place. Although the novel is set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Petry identified the 1938 New England hurricane as the source for the storm that is at the center of her narrative.

Petry remained in Old Saybrook for the rest of her life. She died at the age of 88 on April 28, 1997. She was outlived by her husband George, who died in 2000, and her only daughter, Liz Petry.

McKay, Nellie. "Ann Petry's The Street and The Narrows: A Study of the Influence of Class, Race, and Gender on Afro-American Women's Lives." Women and War. Ed. Maria Diedrich and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung. New York: Berg, 1990.

Petry, Elisabeth, ed. Can Anything Beat White? A Black Family’s Letters. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Author. At Home Inside: A Daughter's Tribute to Ann Petry. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.

“English and the Urban Scene,” speech delivered to Hartford Public High school’s English Department and NDEA Institute of Trinity College, March 6, 1969